Neo-confusion over the war on Syria

Rand Paul and Steve Lonegan: Two traditional conservatives who aren't confused about Syria

When Rand Paul shows up in this state later this week to endorse fellow Republican Steve Lonegan for U.S. Senate, you can expect him to present a consistently conservative position on that resolution before Congress authorizing military action against Syria.

The Kentucky senator can be expected to argue that we are not the policeman of the world and we never should have gotten involved in trying to sort out the Mideast by force.

That is the traditional conservative view of defense policy. When you endorse that view, deciding how to vote on that Syria resolution is simple. You vote no.

But what about the so-called "neo" conservatives? They’re in a tough spot here. President Obama has given the same rationale for invading Syria that George W. Bush gave for invading Iraq: Someone has to stop a horrible despot who has used chemical weapons on his own people and may use them again.

The neocons loved that line when a Republican was pushing it, so how can they reject it when a Democrat is pushing it?

Only through extreme intellectual contortions. The reigning world champions in this regard are the people who write on the opinion pages of the Washington Post. Among them is former Walter Mondale speechwriter Charles Krauthammer, who has managed to get everything wrong about the Mideast for more than a decade.

In October 2003 Krauthammer wrote, "If in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated."

Among those geniuses were traditional conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and Paul’s father Ron, the former Texas congressman. In the 10 years since, the neocon theory of foreign policy has been totally discredited. "Stable, friendly governments" do not automatically arise with the application of American military might.

Nonetheless, the neocons are still pushing that theory as regards Syria. A truly noteworthy intellectual exercise in that vein came from another Post columnist, Marc Thiessen. In a column headlined "Congress should just say no," Thiessen called for "a comprehensive strategy to alter the balance of power by strengthening the secular, moderate pro-Western elements of the opposition so that al Qaeda-backed Islamic extremists do not come to power."

If the Syrian dictator is ousted, we can expect to see the same thing we saw when the Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, fell. The Muslim Brotherhood will crush the "moderates" and the neocons will blame Obama.

Perhaps more instructive is the way Thiessen cries crocodile tears over the use of chemical weapons by the Syrians. In the 1990s, when Congress was considering whether to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty, there was one guy quoted constantly as objecting to that treaty: Thiessen.

At the time he was the spokesman for Jesse Helms, a North Carolina senator who was in bed with the chemical industry. Helms did everything he could to gut the treaty. After it passed, Thiessen was quoted as saying, "Is the world safer than it was six months ago? Probably not."

By 1998, an Associated Press article revealed why we weren’t that much safer: Loopholes put into the treaty by Helms made it possible for Iran to avoid inspections in the event it tried to circumvent the treaty.

Yet 15 years later, Thiessen is upset that Iran’s ally used chemical weapons? In Washington, everybody’s got an angle.

Out here in the hinterlands, it’s different. People care about the national interest, not particular interests, and they see no national interest in following the neocons into yet another exercise in nation-building.

By going to Congress, Obama called the neocons’ bluff. If Republicans back an attack on Syria, then they’re stuck sharing the blame when Colin Powell’s "Pottery Barn Rule" comes into play, as it inevitably will. If the GOP wants to break Syria, then it will share in the ownership of the shards.

But if enough Republicans join with the Democrats in voting this down, Obama will be off the hook. So will the American people. The symbolic impact of that vote would be obvious even inside the Beltway. The era of neocon foreign policy would be over.

At the moment, though, many of the most prominent of the neocons are pushing for a "no" vote. That they are pushing for their own extinction seems to have eluded them.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State John Kerry's public assertions that moderate Syrian opposition groups are growing in influence appear to be at odds with estimates by U.S. and European intelligence sources and nongovernmental experts, who say Islamic extremists remain by far the fiercest and best-organized rebel elements.